Love Your Bod for Its Amazing Job

“Eat it or wear it,” is a phrase a family member used on his kids. The implication was clear: consume the food set before you or be adorned with the contents of your plate. Unfortunate if pea soup was on the dinner menu. We don’t get the same choice with our bodies. We have to wear the skin we’ve been given. (What we eat is another matter entirely.) Love your body or hate it.

Our bodies aren’t a bowl or a plate we can push away in disgust. As we stretch and shrink, lose and gain, firm up or get more flabby, we can easily get disheartened when we don’t look like our ideal body or our younger, fitter selves.

How to Love Your Body

Ludavia Harvey offers an simple mindset: remember why you have a body and what it was made to do.

The exercising and eating right isn’t just for losing weight; it’s for a higher purpose.

Are you a mom? You give up your body for the team: enduring extra pounds for a little bambino and perhaps the marathon of nursing too. Are you a wife? You love your husband by getting your hot bod in fabulous shape. Are you a friend, a mentor, a daughter? You give service and love to the world so you eat greens like a mean veggie-lovin’ machine.

It’s for love. You can eat pea soup or wear it, but your body is yours as long as you live. As I’ve said to my own kids at dinner time, “Be thankful for what you’ve been given.”

Beauty Rewrites

Beauty Rewrites is a body image series for women to help us get on good terms with our bodies. Join us her every Tuesday through July with stories from Ludavia Harvey at NiftyBetty.com, Emily Conrad, and Christina Hubbard at Creative and Free. We hope this series inspires us all to stop pursuing perfection and learn to embrace what’s true and sacredly beautiful about ourselves. Forget ideal. Embrace the real.